Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how ex-subsistence farmers are realising alternative relations to the natural and built environment within Barcelona's public spaces. Who has the right to shape Barcelona, and its' citizens', relation to the natural world?

Paper long abstract:

Urban spaces are predicted to host 68% of the global population by 2050. While the Spanish countryside has been re-filled with macro-farms and monocultures, many rural peasants have moved to cities to be imbibed with urban modalities that erase land knowledge and re-orient relations to the natural world to bourgeois green spaces, such as 'ornamental' parks. Since the 19th century, Barcelona has been designed by fleets of white-collared specialists who (un-)consciously engender novel relations to the more-than-human world. Urban architectures and economic models influence sociality, occupations, and epistemic binaries such as nature/culture and urban/rural. In Barcelona, despite the ultimate design of the city being determined by specialists, often drawing from hard-to-access scientific methodologies, there are thousands of rural migrants in the city who realise alternative relations to their environment, bringing knowledge from the 'rural' areas in which they migrated. Urban food gardens, which have rapidly increased since the 2008 financial crash, are one of the primary faces of grassroots reshaping of public space. My talk will draw from my doctoral fieldwork, exploring an urban garden run by Spanish ex-subsistence farmers. My participants' embedding of an ecologically holistic way of existing in the post-industrial area of Sants opens novel modes of co-existing with the multi-species elements of the city through their rejection of urban cultures of 'nature'. Considering Barcelona's high pollution levels and increasing heat, this paper will open discussions around the possibilities for the city's rural migrants to collaborate on Barcelona's needed re-orientation to the natural and built environment.